Fideism

“What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” (246) This
question of the relation between reason—here represented by
Athens—and faith—represented by Jerusalem—was posed
by the church father Tertullian (c.160–230 CE), and it remains a
central preoccupation among contemporary philosophers of religion.

“Fideism” is the name given to that school of
thought—to which Tertullian himself is frequently said to have
subscribed—which answers that faith is in some sense independent
of, if not outright adversarial toward, reason. In contrast to the
more rationalistic tradition of natural theology, with its arguments
for the existence of God, fideism holds—or at any rate
appears to hold (more on this caveat shortly)—that
reason is unnecessary and inappropriate for the exercise and
justification of religious belief. The term itself derives from
fides, the Latin word for faith, and can be rendered
literally as faith-ism. “Fideism” is thus to be
understood not as a synonym for “religious belief,” but as
denoting a particular philosophical account of faith’s appropriate
jurisdiction vis-a-vis that of reason.

Alvin Plantinga has noted that fideism can be defined as an
“exclusive or basic reliance upon faith alone, accompanied by a
consequent disparagement of reason and utilized especially in the
pursuit of philosophical or religious truth” (87).
Correspondingly, Plantinga writes, a fideist is someone who
“urges reliance on faith rather than reason, in matters
philosophical and religious” and who “may go on to
disparage and denigrate reason” (87). Notice, first, that what
the fideist seeks, according to this account, is truth.
Fideism claims that truths of a certain kind can be grasped only by
foregoing rational inquiry and relying solely on faith. Insofar as
fideism insists that knowledge of these truths is possible, it must be
distinguished from various forms of skepticism with which it otherwise
shares certain common features. Notice too that this definition is
largely formal; the plausibility of fideism as a philosophical
doctrine and the proper extension of the term will therefore depend on
the content given to the terms “faith” and
“reason.”

The formality of definitions like the one cited by Plantinga is likely
to conceal underlying disagreements about what counts as a concrete
instance of fideism. Indeed, there is little agreement among
philosophers about which thinkers can properly be subsumed under this
rubric. To offer a straight “history of fideism” would
thus require one to take up a particular position with respect to a
series of ongoing philosophical disputes. This section thus
attempts—somewhat less ambitiously, though perhaps more
charitably—to sketch a brief history not of fideism but of
“fideism”—i.e., of the term’s (contested) usage
within the philosophical literature.

The term “fideism” appears to have entered the
philosophical lexicon by way of theology in the late nineteenth
century. It was originally used in reference to a movement within
Roman Catholic thought, also known as traditionalism, which
emphasized, over against rationalism, the role of tradition as the
medium by means of which divine revelation is communicated, and which
was sometimes conjoined with a conservative social and political
agenda. Although of late modern vintage, the term
“fideism” has since been applied retrospectively to
thinkers at least as far back as the second century C.E.

Tertullian is frequently cited in this connection as a textbook
fideist. Developing a theme articulated by Paul in his First Letter to
the Corinthians, Tertullian insisted that the truth of Christianity
could be disclosed only by revelation, and that it must necessarily
remain opaque to unregenerate philosophical
reason.[1]
In an oft-quoted passage he maintains (against Marcion) that the
Biblical narrative of Christ’s death and resurrection “is by all
means to be believed, because it is absurd…[T]he fact is
certain, because it is impossible” (525).

However, the conception of Tertullian as anti-rational is not
supported by contemporary scholarship. Contrary to popular belief,
what Tertullian said is not credo quia absurdum but
credible est quia ineptum est. Tertullian’s point seems to
have been that the incarnation represents a paradox: salvation
requires both that God become human and that God remain wholly other.
His quarrel was not with reason per se, but with
philosophical hubris. Eric Osborne writes, “Not only did he
never say ‘credo quia absurdum’, but he never
meant anything like it and never abandoned the claims of Athens upon
Jerusalem” (28). Tertullian, Osborne concludes, was a
“most improbable fideist” (29).

During the Middle Ages, efforts to reconcile Christian doctrine with
Aristotelian logic—newly reintroduced into European thought via
the translation of Aristotle’s corpus from Greek and Arabic—gave
rise to a family of positions that Sheila Delany groups together under
the label “skeptical fideism.” By distinguishing the
revealed truths of the Christian religion, which can be accepted only
via what they posited as a distinct faculty of faith, from the
knowledge-claims to which the dialectical method is relevant,
thirteenth-century thinkers like Boetius of Dacia and his colleague
Siger de Brabant sought a theo-philosophico rapprochement (Delany,
13-17). Pragmatically, this appeal to faith was in the service less of
safeguarding Christian faith than of loosening ecclesiastical
constraints on philosophy. Summarizing these developments, Delany
writes:

With the separation of truths as their declaration of independence,
progressive scholars of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were
able to pursue their arguments as far as logically possible. Skeptical
fideism offered a way of saving both faith and reason, for while faith
was no longer to be supported by reason, neither was it to be denied
out of hand. As a separate mode of perception it could remain valid on
its own terms, neither requiring proof nor infringing on it (21).

The freedom claimed for philosophy was nevertheless a “limited
freedom”: “Indeed logic was still restrained by the very
device that freed it, for as long as doctrine was acknowledged to be
supreme, and God’s will the highest cause, then reason and experience
could attain only relative validity” (Delany, 21).

Moreover, theology had reasons of its own to be suspicious of
experience and (what passes for) reason. Of central importance in this
regard is the idea that one’s rational faculties can be damaged by
sin. Although this idea was articulated by a variety of early
Christian theologians including Tertullian and Augustine (and has
obvious analogues in classical virtue theory), it came to be given
special attention within the Protestant tradition. The reformers held
that the human intellect had been corrupted by humanity’s fall from
grace, and that consequently the truth of Christianity could be
apprehended only by faith. Protestant theologians from Luther and
Calvin to Karl Barth have thus affirmed the priority of faith not only
to “works” but also to natural theology.

Within Roman Catholicism, by contrast, greater weight has
characteristically been given to the classic arguments for God’s
existence. (It is, however, doubtful that these arguments were
historically ever intended as freestanding proofs that would be
convincing to atheists. For an illuminating discussion of the
functions of such arguments in pre-modern and early-modern contexts,
see Clayton, Parts II and III.) This theological division thus
represents part of the context for the debate over fideism. It is
interesting in this connection to note that the Roman Catholic
Magisterium has repeatedly condemned fideism. Absent from the
documents of Vatican I, the term makes what seems to be its first
appearance in a papal encyclical in 1907, in Pius X’s Pascendi
Dominici Gregis (see Other Internet Resources), where fideism is
referenced in the context of a more sweeping critique of
“modernist”
theology.[2]
More recently, in the 1998 encyclical Fides et Ratio (see
Other Internet Resources), John Paul II warned of “a resurgence
of fideism, which fails to recognize the importance of
rational knowledge and philosophical discourse for the understanding
of faith, indeed for the very possibility of belief in God”
(§55), and in Caritas In Veritate (2009, see Other
Internet Resources), his third encyclical, Benedict XVI writes,
“Truth frees charity from the constraints of an emotionalism
that deprives it of relational and social content, and of a fideism
that deprives it of human and universal breathing-space”
(§3). This emphasis on reason in general, and on natural theology
in particular, may help in part to explain how the term
“fideism” has come to function within Roman Catholic
theology largely as a term of opprobrium.

On the other hand—and in a sort of ironic twist—the
counter-Reformation also launched a defense of Catholicism that some
historians have described as fideistic. The Protestant Reformation
coincided with the re-discovery in Europe of the ancient skeptical
arguments of Sextus Empiricus, Cicero, and Diogenes Laertius, and as
Richard H. Popkin has demonstrated, these arguments were quickly
appropriated by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Catholic
philosophers and theologians—including Erasmus, Montaigne,
Pierre Charron, and Petrus Gassendi (as well as by Protestant thinkers
like Pierre Bayle)—who deployed them in the religious
controversies of the
period.[3]
Their contention was simple, if something of an ignoratio
elenchi: since skepticism undermines any reason for becoming a
Protestant, one should remain a Catholic on the basis of faith alone
(Popkin 1992, 122–123).

But although the Protestant reformers and these “nouveaux
Pyrrhoniens” both relied on skeptical arguments to deflate the
pretensions of philosophical “reason,” they tended to draw
somewhat different conclusions about the role and nature of faith. In
the face of uncertainty the latter counseled their readers to remain
loyal to the prevailing religious conventions of the time—in
this case Roman Catholicism. But they tended to eschew the religious
enthusiasm characteristic of the more pietistic Protestant sects.
Theirs was thus a temperate and tentative faith, grounded in action
rather than doctrine. If they were fideistic, they were nevertheless
not dogmatic. According to the reformed view, by contrast, the domain
of faith is characterized by fervor and passionate commitment:
skepticism thus ultimately gives way to certainty and religious
assurance of a kind unassailable by philosophical doubt. In his book
God and Skepticism, Terence Penelhum calls the latter view
“evangelical fideism,” and he distinguishes it from the
“conformist fideism” that identifies faith with loyalty to
a tradition (15–16).

The theological developments in the nineteenth century in reference to
which the term “fideism” was first used had their
philosophical inspiration not simply in the skepticism of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, but also, and more
immediately, in Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy. For Kant, God’s
existence was a postulate of practical—rather than
pure—reason. Accordingly, Kant rejected the traditional
“proofs” of God’s existence—the cosmological,
teleological, and ontological arguments—in favor of a moral
argument. Thus, although Kant famously championed the conception of a
thoroughly “rational” (i.e., moral) version of
Christianity—a “religion within the limits of reason
alone”—he also placed religious belief outside the domain
of what can be known by means of speculative philosophy. In this way,
he “found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to
make room for faith” (1929, 29).

The earliest documented uses of the term “fideism” are to
be found in French theology. Thomas D. Carroll has located references
to fidéisme from as early as 1854 (2008, 10); however,
the term appears to have entered into broader circulation in the
literature a quarter-century later, when it came to be used
pejoratively in reference to Catholic traditionalism by theologians
seeking to revive the Thomistic synthesis of reason and faith.

At around the same time or shortly thereafter, Carroll argues, the
term appears to have originated independently in the work of the
French Protestant theologians Eugèene Ménégoz
(1838–1921) and Auguste Sabatier (1839–1901), who (unlike
the Catholic traditionalists of whom it was predicated by their
critics) applied it to themselves. Ménégoz and Sabatier
both sought to distinguish faith—understood in terms of
something akin to Schleiermacher’s feeling of absolute
dependence—from propositional belief, arguing that salvation
depends on the former, rather than on assent to any particular
doctrine. Because of Sabatier’s emphasis on religious symbols, this
view was sometimes called
“symbolo-fideism.”[4]

As Carroll observes, the projection of the term “fideism”
ahistorically—onto thinkers as removed from the context in which
it originated as Tertullian—is potentially the source of much
confusion, given that the meanings of key terms like
“faith” and “reason” vary dramatically from
one context to another. Moreover, the term’s presently widespread
pejorative connotations render “fideism” problematic as a
descriptive category.

Today the term “fideism” is perhaps most commonly
associated with four philosophers: Pascal, Kierkegaard, James, and
Wittgenstein. In order to assess how well the label fits, it will be
helpful to discuss their respective views in slightly more detail.
Note, however, that each is also treated at greater length elsewhere
in this encyclopedia.

Whereas Montaigne’s followers, though significant theological figures
in their day, “showed no particular fervor in their religious
views” and practiced a “tepid, if sincere” form of
Catholicism (Popkin 1992, 124), the same could not be said of Blaise
Pascal (1623–1662), whose Pensées attest to a
more “evangelical” brand of Pyrrhonian piety. Following a
transformative mystical experience in 1654, Pascal spent much of the
remainder of his life in the monasteries of Port-Royal, working out a
defense of his faith.

Central to this defense, seemingly paradoxically, is the conviction
that belief in God cannot be defended by means of the usual apologetic
arguments. The very nature of what is believed in—namely, an
“infinitely incomprehensible” being—is such as to
render these arguments necessarily inadequate.

Who then will blame Christians for not being able to give reasons for
their beliefs, since they profess belief in a religion which they
cannot explain? They declare, when they expound it to the world, that
it is foolishness, stultitiam; and then you complain because
they do not prove it! If they proved it, they would not keep their
word; it is through their lack of proofs that they show they are not
lacking in sense (201).

The most the philosophical arguments could prove, Pascal suggests, is
the “god of the philosophers”—not the “God of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

Pascal insists that faith can nevertheless be rational in the absence
of proof—i.e., that it is rational in a prudential rather than
an epistemic sense. It is here that he introduces his celebrated
“Wager” arguments. Pascal’s first move in the argument is
a skeptical one. He argues that although God either exists or does not
exist, we cannot settle the issue on the basis of reason alone. The
proofs of God’s existence are not conclusive, but neither are the
proofs of God’s non-existence. “Reason can determine
nothing” (201).

Granting that reason is indeed neutral with respect to the question of
whether or not God exists, it might at first be thought that the
safest and most rational course of action would be to refuse to take a
stand one way or the other—to remain agnostic about the
existence of God. However, Pascal argues that this is not possible:
not choosing to believe is equivalent to choosing
not to believe. If you do not choose for God, you in
effect choose against God. But on what basis, then, should
one decide?

The solution, Pascal argues, is to weigh the potential rewards of
believing in God against the potential rewards of failing to believe
in God—i.e., to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of the relative
merits of “wagering” for or against God’s existence. The
options, as Pascal construes them, can be outlined in the form of a
table:

God exists

God does not exist.

Believe

Infinite Gain

No (or Finite) Loss/Finite Gain

Disbelieve

Infinite Loss

Finite Gain

These options can be assessed in terms of what is known within
contemporary decision theory as the Expected Value Principle (EVP).
The EVP states that when one is faced with a choice among competing
courses of action, one should choose whichever has the highest
“expected value.” Expected value can be calculated by (a)
multiplying the probability of a successful outcome by the value of
that outcome; (b) multiplying the probability of an unsuccessful outcome by
the cost of that outcome; and (c) taking the sum of the results
of (a) and (b). In light of the EVP it can be rational to gamble on an
improbable outcome given a sufficiently high potential payoff.

Of course, in the case of God, it is hard to determine what the
chances of a successful outcome might be: we cannot justifiably
assume, for example, that the likelihood of God existing is equal to
the likelihood of God not existing. But that is irrelevant, Pascal
argues, because the payoff if God exists is an infinite
payoff. Thus, the potential for infinite gain makes it rational to bet
that God exists, however slim the actual chances of this might be: as
long as one is willing to grant that there is “one chance of
winning against a finite number of chances of losing,” it is a
better deal to bet on God (202–203).

Although Pascal’s argument seems to be valid—that is, its
conclusion follows logically from its premises—Pascal’s critics
have raised a number of other objections to it. In the first place, it
has been said that any argument which seeks to justify faith entirely
in such crassly prudential terms is necessarily impious or improper.
To be sure, it is hard to avoid feeling, as William James put it,
“that when religious faith expresses itself thus, in the
language of the gaming-table, it is put to its last trumps” (6).
James went on to remark that “if we were ourselves in the place
of the Deity, we should probably take particular pleasure in cutting
off believers of this pattern from their infinite reward” (6).
In fairness, however, it should be noted that Pascal’s use of the
“Wager” is merely instrumental. It is intended simply as a
first step toward, and not as a substitute for, genuine religious
faith. Furthermore, the claim that it is somehow improper to base such
a decision on prudential reasons seems to presuppose precisely what
Pascal denies—namely, that there are epistemic reasons on which
one’s decision might more appropriately be made to rest. It is
important to appreciate that Pascal is not urging his readers to
believe something they otherwise have reason to doubt. As he puts it,
“Your reason is not more deeply wounded by choosing one rather
than the other because it is bound to choose” (202).

But can one choose to believe for purely instrumental reasons? A
second worry is that Pascal’s argument seems to presuppose a
problematic version of doxastic voluntarism, the view that
believing is subject to the will. Believing in God, unlike raising
one’s arm, it might be objected, is not open to direct voluntary
control. However, Pascal anticipates this objection, arguing that a
would-be believer should begin by imitating the motions of a believer.
By, for instance, attending Mass and taking holy water, a would-be
believer may succeed in cultivating genuine belief. This argument
suggests that Pascal is committed to the less controversial thesis of
indirect doxastic voluntarism—the view that a person
can indirectly control his or her beliefs by directly controlling his
or her epistemic situation. Still, the prospect of voluntarily
inducing belief for purely non-epistemic reasons has struck many
commentators as manipulative and self-deceptive.

A third problem is that Pascal’s argument depends upon an overly
narrow construal of one's religious options. It is of course the case,
as Pascal claims, that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob either
exists or does not exist, but the same is true of a seemingly endless
number of other possible deities. If we assume the possibility of
infinite reward in each case, it is no longer clear that Catholicism
is any more rational than its religious alternatives. In reply, Jeff
Jordan recently has argued that the “Wager” can be
reconfigured to show, not that one religion is more rational than
another, but simply that atheism and agnosticism are irrational.

Jordan follows Pascal in treating religious belief as a necessary
prerequisite for eternal happiness. However, some critics have
questioned this assumption. How do we know—it might be
asked—that if he or she exists, God would make salvation
contingent on correct belief? Pascal seems to vacillate between a
professed ignorance of God’s nature and some rather doctrinaire
assumptions about it. Indeed, if one grants that there is even a small
chance of achieving infinite bliss by pursuing a
non-religious path, then the EVP suggests that such a path
would be just as rational in light of its expected value.

Although Pascal’s “Wager” is widely regarded as having
been discredited, within the past few years there has been a revival
of philosophical interest in the argument, and some contemporary
philosophers have attempted to rehabilitate a version of it. In
Rationality and Religious Theism, for instance, Joshua L.
Golding adopts a broadly Pascalian strategy in defense of what he
calls “religious theism.” Whereas Pascal focused his
attention on the question of whether it is rational to believe in
God, Golding is primarily concerned with the question of whether
it is rational to pursue a religious way of life—one in
which beliefs about God’s existence might play a relatively minor and
non-foundational role. To qualify as a religious theist, Golding
explains, one must seek to enter into a good relationship with God,
and for this it is sufficient to believe simply that God’s existence
is not impossible (i.e., that the concept of “God” is not
contradictory) and that it is at least slightly more likely that one
can achieve a good relationship with God by adopting a religious way
of life than by not doing so. Arguing on the basis of the EVP, Golding
contends that it is rational to be a religious theist if one conceives
of the value of a good relationship with God as “qualitatively
superior” to any other value.

Whereas Pascal held that the payoff of believing in God would be
infinite, if God exists, Golding is careful to insist that the value
of a good relationship with God is finite. Otherwise, as he notes, we
are faced with the problem—alluded to above—that more than
one path might be equally rational for a person in light of its
expected value. If, however, the value of a good relationship with God
is finite, then whichever path is deemed to have the greatest chance
of success at achieving this reward will have the highest expected
value, other things being equal. Of course, the expected value of the
good relationship with God must be higher than the expected value of
any non-religious pursuit, however likely the latter is to result in a
mundane payoff. Thus, Golding holds that the value of a good
relationship with God should be understood “not merely as
‘a lot better’ or ‘vastly better’ than any
other goal,” but as qualitatively different. Given this
difference in kind, Golding concludes that “no quantitative
amount of other goods added together would equal the value” of
the good relationship with God (66).

However, it is unclear whether Golding’s version of the
“Wager” argument is ultimately more successful than
Pascal’s. The problem is that the EVP requires a single index of value
in accordance with which gambles can be compared, whereas Golding’s
contention that the value of the good relationship with God is
different in kind from other values seems to suggest the
incommensurability of two different indices. Thus, although the
argument purports to show that religious theism is a more rational
choice, it seems ultimately to hinge not on an objective comparison of
two commensurable quantities but on a preference for goods of a
certain type. It might well be the case that certain goods are
preferable to others, even though there is no single scale of value by
means of which to rank them, but showing this would seem to require a
different sort of argument than the one Golding presents. In other
words, Golding’s quantitative argument in favor of the
religious life over the non-religious life seems to be undercut by his
insistence that the outcomes being compared are qualitatively
different.

In any event, it is worth noting that Pascal and his intellectual
heirs, though frequently characterized as fideists, are not
antagonistic to reason tout court. In the first place, as
Pascal sees it, it is reasonable to acknowledge limits to
reason. “Reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an
infinite number of things which are beyond it” (209). It is in
this spirit that he suggests, somewhat more elliptically, that
“[t]here is nothing which is so much in conformity with reason
as the rejection of reason” (209). Thus, Pascal invokes reason
to justify what might otherwise appear to be its antithesis. Moreover,
the aim of the “Wager” argument is precisely to secure the
rational respectability of faith in the face of an apparent antinomy.
In this respect, Pascal’s approach anticipates Kant’s contention that
God’s existence is a question for practical—as opposed
to theoretical—reason.

Any discussion of Søren Kierkegaard’s thought is complicated by
the fact that he wrote pseudonymously, attributing most of his
writings to a variety of fictional authors whose “views”
may or may not have corresponded to his own. In The Point of View
for My Work as an Author—one of the few works to which
Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was willing to append his own
signature—he explains his use of the pseudonyms by noting that
philosophical and religious confusion can be addressed only
indirectly: “one must approach from behind the person who is
under an illusion” (1848, 24–25). He adds that the
illusion against which his pseudonymous writings are directed is an
illusion about what Christianity requires, and that these writings,
though employing philosophical tools, thus subserve a religious
intent. According to this retrospective self-assessment, the whole of
Kierkegaard’s work “is related to Christianity, to the problem
‘of becoming a Christian,’ with a direct or indirect
polemic against the monstrous illusion we call Christendom, or against
the illusion that in such a land as ours all are Christians of a
sort” (1848, 5–6).

Although it is a subject of debate whether to take at face value
Kierkegaard’s claim that his entire work serves a religious
end—after all, it seems to be contradicted by other remarks of
his—it is nevertheless clear that combating confusion, including
illusions about faith, was central to his
work.[5]
Kierkegaard suggests that speculative philosophy contributes to this
confusion by transforming Christianity into a sort of philosophical
theory or system. (Hegel is frequently—if not always entirely
fairly—parodied in this connection.) In so doing, it imports
into religion modes of inquiry that distort the essential nature of
faith.

It is perhaps tempting to imagine that the relation between evidence
and belief is purely epistemological, a question of justification. On
this account, beliefs mean what they do irrespective of their relation
to “the evidence”; what a consideration of the latter
reveals is whether or not they are justified. But one of the
implications of Kierkegaard’s thought is that entitlement is a social
status, and that the various social practices within which it is
conferred or withheld contribute to the meaning of the beliefs in
question. There are different kinds of beliefs, logically speaking,
and different ways in which entitlement to such beliefs is vindicated.
The basic error to which philosophical systematizers are prone, he
argues, is assuming that the criteria for evaluating a belief in one
context are equally appropriate in other contexts. He writes,
“in our own age everything is mixed together: the aesthetic is
treated ethically, faith is dealt with intellectually, and so forth.
Philosophy has answered every question; but no adequate consideration
has been given the question concerning what sphere it is within which
each question finds its answer” (Anthology, 229).

Within the sphere of the “intellectual”—e.g., within
scientific or historical scholarship—inquiry is conceived in
terms of a process of “approximation” to reality. When it
comes to religion, however, what matters, according to Kierkegaard, is
not the “object to which the knower relates himself” but
the relationship itself: the accent falls not on “what is
said” but on “how it is said” (1846, 199
and 202). For Kierkegaard, as for the so-called evangelical fideists,
faith is characterized by passionate commitment and thus requires a
decision or “qualitative leap” (1846, 384). His
claim is not simply that having evidence is unnecessary in
this context, but that it would, so to speak, destroy the whole
endeavor, since it would alter the meaning of the beliefs in
question and the spirit in which they could be believed. “If I
am able to apprehend God objectively, I do not have faith; but because
I cannot do this, I must have faith. If I want to keep myself in
faith, I must continually see to it that I hold fast the objective
uncertainty, see to it that in the objective uncertainty I am
‘out on 70,000 fathoms of water’ and still have
faith” (1846, 204). Any belief that depended on the outcome of
historical or scientific approximation—and which could be
undermined by its results—would not be genuine faith, and
anything whose existence could be established purely on the basis of
philosophical argument—and so could be believed in
“indifferently,” without this belief making a significant
difference in one’s life—would by definition not be God.
“Anyone who wants to demonstrate the existence of
God…proves something else instead, at times something that
perhaps did not even need demonstrating, and in any case never
anything better” (1844, 43).

Kierkegaard’s point is not that it is somehow permissible to neglect
one’s epistemic duties where belief in God is concerned, but that one
cannot separate the question of “what” is believed from
the question of “how” it is believed. (For a contemporary
defense of this point, see Strandberg (2011), especially Chapters 1
and 4.) Here the “how” refers to “the relationship
sustained by the existing individual, in his own existence, to the
content of his utterance” (Anthology, 214).
Religion, for Kierkegaard, is a matter of what one does with one’s
life, a matter of “inwardness.” In this context, to
observe that religious believers lack evidence for their beliefs is
not to render a negative verdict on their entitlement but to comment
conceptually on the kind of beliefs they are.

Was Kierkegaard a fideist? Critics have argued that in recoiling from
natural theology, Kierkegaard transformed belief into a matter of will
and emotion, and that a decision as monumental as a leap of
faith—made seemingly arbitrarily, in the absence of any rational
assurance—might just as easily have disastrous results. J.L.
Mackie, for instance, claims that “what Kierkegaard himself is
advocating is a sort of intellectual Russian roulette” (216). So
far, it might be argued, Kierkegaard has done little to show that a
leap in the direction of Christianity is a better bet than any of its
alternatives, and that a wiser tack—as Hume counseled in
connection with alleged miracles—would be to proportion belief
(and passion) to the available evidence. Kierkegaard’s defenders might
reply that it is only from the “outside”—from the
point of view, e.g., of the dispassionate pseudonyms—that
Christianity appears ungrounded and “absurd,” and that
Kierkegaard’s point is really that those already in possession of
faith need not be embarrassed by the fact that it is not the
ineluctable outcome of reasoning from an imagined set of neutral and
uncontested premises.

Although he relentlessly criticized what he perceived as the
overweening ambitions of academic philosophy and an unwarranted
reliance on foundationalist tendencies in theology, Kierkegaard held
that faith and reason are not mutually incompatible, and that
philosophy—when practiced with respect for the “conditions
of existence” within which human beings necessarily do their
thinking—can ultimately help to clarify the nature of Christian
commitment. For Kierkegaard, faith is incomprehensible, in
the sense that it demands a willingness to venture beyond the purview
of philosophical reason, but it is not unreasonable or
irrational. Thus, although he describes faith as
“believing against the understanding,” he is careful to
distinguish the content of religious belief from mere
“nonsense.” The believer “cannot believe nonsense
against the understanding, which one might fear, because the
understanding will penetratingly perceive that it is nonsense and
hinder him in believing it”; however, the believer “uses
the understanding so much that through it he becomes aware of the
incomprehensible”—i.e., of the logical limits of
speculative thought—“and now, believing, he relates
himself to it against the understanding” (1992, 568). By
discriminating between those cases in which it is competent to judge
and those in which it is not, philosophy thus plays a self-critical
role: mindful of its own limits, it allows religion to be itself.

Mackie’s contention that fideism is intellectually irresponsible was
anticipated in the nineteenth century by W.K. Clifford, who famously
declared that “[i]t is wrong always, everywhere, and for every
one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence” (346). The
American pragmatist William James (1842–1910) called Clifford
“that delicious enfant terrible,” and in his
essay “The Will to Believe” he argued that Clifford had
overstated the case against faith (8). In the paper, James delineates
a set of conditions under which, he argues, it can be reasonable to
believe in the absence of proof.

These conditions are met whenever we are confronted by what James
terms a “genuine option”—i.e., a choice between two
(or more) “hypotheses” (or candidates for belief) which is
“live,” “forced,” and
“momentous”—and that option cannot be decided on
intellectual grounds. An option is live (as opposed to dead) just in
case each of the hypotheses at issue is “among the mind’s
possibilities” (2). Insofar as it depends upon an individual’s
willingness or ability to entertain it, a hypothesis’
“liveliness” is an extrinsic, agent-specific property. By
contrast, an option is forced (rather than avoidable) just in case the
candidate hypotheses are both mutually exclusive and exhaustive of the
possibilities. Finally, an option is momentous (as opposed to trivial)
just in case the opportunity is unique, the stakes are significant, or
the decision is irreversible.

James points out that as people who hold beliefs, we generally have
two goals: to avoid error, and to believe the truth. Though related,
these aims are in fact distinct: one can, for example, avoid error by
suspending belief. James argues that the scientific method is
oriented around the goal of avoiding error, but that in other aspects
of life, the avoidance of error is
inadequate.[6]
For instance, in our relationships with others, we first have to
believe that others will meet us half-way in order for this
to be true. If we refused to interact with others until we had
“sufficient evidence” of their willingness to reciprocate,
we would no doubt appear stand-offish and unapproachable, thus cutting
ourselves off altogether from the possibility of entering into
mutually rewarding relationships.

According to James, something similar is true in the case of religion.
Religion, he says, teaches two things: (1) that “the best things
are the more eternal things” and (2) that we are better off now
if we believe (1) (25–26). These two assertions together
comprise what James refers to as the “religious
hypothesis.” He contends that if the religious hypothesis is a
live hypothesis, the option with which it confronts us is
necessarily also a genuine option—i.e., it is momentous
and forced. In cases like this, James contends, it is not enough
simply to avoid error; we also have to seek truth. “We cannot
escape the issue by remaining sceptical and waiting for more light,
because, although we do avoid error in that way if religion be
untrue, we lose the good, if it be true, just as
certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve” (26). As in
the social example, the religious hypothesis must, as it were, be met
half-way.

James acknowledges that choosing under such circumstances entails
risk—one might, after all, be wrong—but he denies that one
can avoid or reduce this risk by refusing to choose.
Skepticism—i.e., the refusal to choose—is just as risky as
commitment. Furthermore, all such postures are inevitably—and,
indeed, completely appropriately—shaped by one’s passions: not
deciding is just as much a matter of emotion as deciding, insofar as
it is motivated by the fear of being wrong rather than the hope of
being right. But, James contends, there is no rational basis for
preferring fear over hope.

Like Pascal, James insists that when it comes to religion, we cannot
avoid taking sides and incurring risks. James also agrees with Pascal
that faith can be rational in the absence of epistemic
justification—at least in certain circumstances. However,
James’s argument differs from Pascal’s insofar as it purports to show,
not that religious belief is more rational, but only that in
the absence of definitive evidence it is not less rational,
than unbelief or agnosticism (at least with respect to those for whom
the religious hypothesis is live).

Although he disagrees with Clifford about the justifiability of
believing without conclusive proof, James appears to share Clifford’s
view that—at least in certain cases—belief is subject to
the will (hence the title of his essay). In other words, James’s
argument in “The Will to Believe,” like Pascal’s wager
argument, seems to imply some version of doxastic voluntarism. But
depending on how this latter notion is understood, certain worries may
here arise. If belief is understood as a function of one’s total
epistemic situation, rather than an independent judgment which that
situation might or might not warrant, then James’s analogy between
believing and entering into a relationship appears problematic: only
the latter is subject to direct voluntary control. Of course,
believing is subject to indirect voluntary control. In other
words, one can change one’s beliefs by changing one’s epistemic
circumstances; the latter, even if not the former, are susceptible to
direct control by the will. James himself acknowledges that, in the
vast majority of cases, beliefs are not modifiable at will: “Can
we, by just willing it, believe that Abraham Lincoln’s existence is a
myth, and that the portraits of him in McClure’s Magazine are
all of someone else? Can we, by any effort of our will, or by any
strength of wish that it were true, believe ourselves well and about
when we are roaring with rheumatism in bed, or feel certain that the
sum of the two one-dollar bills in our pocket must be a hundred
dollars?” (4-5) James appears to take the position that it is
only with respect to live hypotheses that the will can play a
role.

A related objection is that James does not appear to take account of
the possibility of “partial beliefs,” and that doing so
undermines his notion of a forced option. If believing admits of
degrees, then choices of the kind James describes seem less stark.
Responding to this kind of anticipated objection to his own work
(described in Section 4 below), John Bishop has argued that a forced
choice is required whenever one is confronted by the rival
“framing principles” of alternative doxastic practices.
“One either ‘buys into’ the framework by commitment
to its principles or one does not” (139).

James’s essay is intended as a “defence of our right to adopt a
believing attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our
merely logical intellect may not have been coerced” (1–2).
Some critics have worried that the argument leads down a slippery
slope to irrationalism. John Hick has claimed that James’s conclusion
“constitutes an unrestriced license for wishful thinking…
If our aim is to believe what is true, and not necessarily what we
like, James’s universal permissiveness will not help us” (60).
However, this seems unfair. James insists that in defending the
“lawfulness of voluntarily adopted faith” he is not
thereby opening the door to what he calls “patent
superstition” (2, 29). Faith, on James’s account, is not a
matter of believing against the evidence; the “will to
believe” is justified only when the option is genuine and the
evidence is inconclusive. “In concreto,” James
writes, “the freedom to believe can only cover living options
which the intellect of the individual cannot by itself resolve; and
living options never seem absurdities to him who has them to
consider” (29).

It is important to appreciate that James is not claiming that
it is morally permissible to believe something to which one is not
epistemically entitled. Rather, he is claiming that there are beliefs
to which one can be epistemically entitled even in the absence of
definitive evidence—that, pace Clifford, entitlement is
not always a function of evidential support. Although James’s argument
is often classified as a pragmatic argument for belief, he is not
offering a prudential, as opposed to an epistemic,
justification. Rather, he is comparing the relative merits of rival
epistemic strategies (oriented respectively toward the goals of
avoiding error and believing truth). In this respect his argument
differs importantly from Pascal’s “wager” arguments. It
can thus be argued that James is not disparaging reason in favor of
faith, but attempting rather to carve out a sphere for faith within
what is rationally respectable.

Widely regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth
century, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was also one of the
most controversial and difficult. Wittgenstein famously argued that
“meaning is use”—that our words mean what they do by
virtue of the role they play in our discourse. Moreover, he argued
that words are used in more than one way, and that it is a mistake to
“sublime the logic” of our language—i.e., to treat
any single function of language as paradigmatic. “Think of the
tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screw-driver,
a rule, a glue-pot, nails and screws.—The functions of words are
as diverse as the functions of these objects” (1958, I,
§11).

In his later writings, Wittgenstein calls these diverse phenomena
language-games, in order, he explains, “to bring into
prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of
an activity, or a form of life” (1958, I, §23). Renouncing
his own earlier quest for a general form of propositions, his later
writings suggest that these language-games “have no one thing in
common which makes us use the same word for all,—but that they
are related to one another in many different ways”
(1958, I, §65).

Although Wittgenstein was not by conventional standards
religious, his philosophical remarks and journal entries
reveal what might be described as a religious sensibility and are
informed by a definite sympathy toward at least certain features of
religion. For Wittgenstein, as for Kierkegaard, whom he admired,
religion was less a matter of theory than of practice. “I
believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound
doctrines are all useless. They have to change your life. (Or
the direction of your life.)…Wisdom is passionless.
But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a
passion” (1980, 53e).

It has been argued that Wittgenstein’s later thought, though perhaps
not overtly fideistic, nevertheless lends itself to fideistic
interpretation. According to this interpretation, religion is a
self-contained and primarily expressive enterprise, governed by its
own internal logic or “grammar.” This view—commonly
called Wittgensteinian Fideism—is variously
characterized as entailing one or more of the following distinct (but
arguably inter-related) theses: (1) that religion is logically cut off
from other aspects of life; (2) that religious discourse is
essentially self-referential and does not allow us to talk about
reality; (3) that religious beliefs can be understood only by
religious believers; and (4) that religion cannot be
criticized.[7]

It is highly doubtful, however, whether Wittgenstein would have
endorsed any of these claims, let alone all four of them. Their
attribution to Wittgenstein seems in fact to depend on a narrowly
selective reading of what he actually said. As Richard Bell has
pointed out,

It is premised on the view that our language is a series of
language-games rooted in a form of life each governed by its own set
of rules—as if our life of speaking and acting were like a bag
of marbles, separate spherical speech-worlds with their own boundaries
and rules governing their size and elasticity and use—some are
shooters, others decorative, all rest side by side and affect their
neighbors only if they collide (217–218).

It is true that Wittgenstein cautioned against the tendency to assume
a unity of logical form behind the diversity of actual usage. He
writes, “Don’t say: ‘There must be something
common…’—but look and see” (1958, I,
§66). However, it is by no means clear that he intended to
advance any equally a priori thesis about the discontinuity
and incommensurability of our discursive practices.

Indeed, he suggests that the result of “looking” is that
“we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and
criss-crossing” (1958, I, §66). A metaphor to which he
returns periodically is of language as an ancient city:
“a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses,
and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded
by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and
uniform houses” (1958, I, §18). Remarks such as these seem
to militate against the balkanized view of language implied by
Wittgensteinian Fideism.

It also should be noted that the term “Wittgensteinian
Fideism” appeared after Wittgenstein’s death but prior to the
publication in English of some of his most important writings on
religion, including Lectures on Religious Belief (1967),
Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough (1979), and Culture and
Value (1980) —i.e., at a time when Wittgenstein’s legacy
was particularly vulnerable to misinterpretation.

The origins of the term “Wittgensteinian Fideism” derive
from an essay of that name by Kai Nielsen, which appeared in the July
1967 issue of Philosophy. There Nielsen suggested that
Wittgensteinian Fideism might in fact constitute a misrepresentation
of Wittgenstein’s writings—not, interestingly enough, by his
critics, but by his followers—and that
“Wittgenstein might well wish to say of Wittgensteinians what
Freud said of Freudians” (194). Accordingly, Nielsen directed
the brunt of his critique not against Wittgenstein himself, but
against Wittgensteinians like Norman Malcolm and Peter Winch. More
recently, the charge of Wittgensteinian Fideism has become associated
especially with the work of the philosopher of religion D.Z.
Phillips.

Although it is impossible here to explore these allegations in any
detail, it is worth noting that Wittgensteinians generally regard
“Wittgensteinian Fideism” as a caricature not only of
Wittgenstein’s views but also of their own. In defending himself and
other Wittgensteinian philosophers of religion against the charge of
fideism, Phillips writes:

Many philosophers of religion influenced by Wittgenstein have spent
much of their time denying that connections of a certain kind
hold between religious beliefs and other aspects of human life.
Similarly, they have denied the appropriateness of certain
kinds of criticisms of religion. Those who have been criticized
often react as follows: “This is what I mean by the connection
between religion and other aspects of human life and this is what I
mean by criticism of religion. Here [are] Phillips and others like him
denying the intelligibility of such connections and criticism.
Therefore Phillips and others like him hold that there is no
connection between religion and other aspects of human life and that
religion cannot be criticized.” Of course, all that I and others
have denied is their conception of the relation between
religion and other aspects of human life and their conception
of criticism of religion. Sometimes, the explanation of the
persistence of the critical theses concerning Wittgenstein’s influence
in the philosophy of religion…is as simple as that (1981,
89–90).

In the last decade of his life, Phillips in fact devoted considerable
attention to what, following his teacher Rush Rhees, he called the
unity—i.e., the interlocking intelligibility—of
discourse. He argued that religious beliefs depend for their sense and
importance on non-religious features of human existence, but that the
relation between the former and the latter is not generally the
relation between conclusions and their justification.

Phillips’s longstanding debate with Nielsen is commonly portrayed as a
modern-day contest between faith and reason, but Phillips never
regarded it that way himself. Whereas Nielsen treats Phillips’s
“contemplative” approach to philosophy of religion as
essentially an apologetic strategy meant to shield belief in God from
criticism, Phillips contended that “it casts a liberating light
on both belief and atheism. Both are rescued from
philosophical distortion” (2005, 75). As Phillips saw it, his
disagreement with Nielsen was a disagreement not between the advocates
of competing first-order commitments, but between Nielsen’s atheism
and his own professed desire to do conceptual justice to rival points
of view, both religious and anti-religious—an asymmetry that the
term “fideism,” with its pietistic connotations, seemed to
him to obscure.

One lesson to be gleaned from the preceding cases is that
“fideism” is a term that is seldom self-applied. This is
no doubt largely because it has come to function primarily as a term
of abuse as opposed to a genuinely descriptive term. In this respect,
its de facto role is similar to that played by terms like
“relativism” and, perhaps, “anti-realism.”
Such labels generally say at least as much about the philosophical
commitments of those who use them as they do about the positions to
which they are applied.

Popkin argues that the skepticism introduced into theology in the
sixteenth century eventually led to the atheism and irreligious
“free-thinking” of the Enlightenment. After all, Hume says
essentially the same thing as the so-called fideists when he writes
that “[o]ur most holy religion is founded on faith, not
on reason” (140), except that by the eighteenth century this had
been transformed into an implicit—if
not-so-subtle—reproach. Thus, Hume proceeds to add that
since “[m]ere reason is insufficient to convince us of its
veracity…whoever is moved by faith to assent to
[Christianity] is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person
which subverts all the principles of his understanding and gives him a
determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and
experience” (141). The sarcasm here is hard to miss.

Hence, by the time the term “fideism” entered the
philosophical vocabulary, the position it denoted was already highly
suspect. In an Age of Reason, faith-ism is inevitably going
to sound irrational. However, the conception of reason which
the putative fideist is accused of transgressing is almost invariably
one the latter would reject as insufficiently robust. Thus, the
opposition to reason said to characterize fideism is perhaps better
conceived as a rejection of a particular account of
reason—one the so-called fideist regards as overly narrow and
restrictive—or of the applicability to religion of a particular
way of reasoning. To be sure, the thinkers described as
“fideists” have sometimes expressed their objections in
ways that contribute to the impression of irrationalism. Looked at
from this point of view, however, it is the critic of fideism who
fails to appreciate the irony with which the putative fideist uses the
term “reason.” In effect, the putative fideist can
generally more charitably be interpreted as claiming that it can be
rational to refuse to subject certain of one’s beliefs to
what is popularly (though misleadingly, from the point of view of the
putative fideist) called “reason”— reason, so to
speak, in “scare quotes.”

To generalize, what the thinkers labeled “fideists” have
tended to find objectionable is not reason per se, but
evidentialism—i.e., the doctrine (expressed forcefully
by Clifford) that beliefs can be rational only if they are supported
by evidence. Since evidentialism might otherwise seem to give rise to
a regress problem, it is generally conjoined with some version of
foundationalism which purports to delineate a criterion of
“proper basicality”—i.e., a set of conditions under
which beliefs can rationally be held without further evidential
support. Whereas some putative fideists—like Pascal—argue
that religious beliefs can be given non-evidential support, others can
be interpreted as suggesting that such beliefs are themselves properly
basic, or (as Plantinga has argued more recently) that no criterion of
proper basicality that would exclude religious beliefs can itself be
shown to be justified. Their contention in either case is that the
believer can be rationally justified—or at least cannot be shown
to be behaving irrationally—in holding certain beliefs,
even if these beliefs themselves are not supported by evidence.
Conceived of in this way, the putative fideist’s position—though
not uncontroversial—is hardly the brazenly paradoxical doctrine
it might at first appear to be.

In recent years, a small number of philosophers of religion has
embraced the term fideism and sought to reclaim its
non-pejorative use. These thinkers are rare among philosophers in
their willingness to take up a gauntlet that is usually
refused—even by those with views in many respects similar to
their own.

One of the most carefully argued contemporary defenses of fideism is
C. Stephen Evans’s book Faith Beyond Reason. Evans attempts
to rehabilitate—or perhaps habilitate—the term by
distinguishing “responsible” forms of fideism from various
irrationalistic alternatives. Whereas the latter pit faith directly
against reason, the former contend that faith can
appropriately take over where reason leaves matters of ultimate
concern unresolved. Drawing on Kierkegaard’s thought, Evans contends
that while there are limits to reason, they are limits which it is
reasonable for reason to acknowledge.

Like the Protestant Reformers, Evans suggests that the customary
exercise of human reason is limited not merely by finitude but also by
pride and self-centeredness. For this reason, faith and reason can
find themselves in tension. For Evans, however, “faith is
against reason only in the sense that it runs into conflict with a
concrete form of reason that is damaged” (153). Moreover, Evans
insists that the defects in reason—though substantial—are
nevertheless not such as to render us completely oblivious to them.
Thus, he does not reject reason altogether. In his preferred
terminology, faith is not so much against as beyond
reason, since it is ultimately compatible, in his view, with a duly
self-critical intellect.

Another recent defense of fideism can be found in John Bishop’s book
Believing by Faith: An Essay in the Epistemology and Ethics of
Religious Belief. Where Evans draws on Kierkegaard, Bishop builds
on James’s argument in “The Will to Believe” to develop
what he terms a “modest, moral coherentist,
‘supra-evidential’ fideism” (3).

A crucial premise in Bishop’s argument is what he terms the
“thesis of evidential ambiguity,” which holds that, under
“rational empiricist evidential practice,” our overall
experience of the world is equally plausibly interpreted on either a
theistic or an atheistic reading, thereby leaving open the question of
God’s existence (70–1). He argues that under appropriate
conditions—essentially those comprising what James called a
“genuine option,” together with evidential indeterminacy,
on the one hand, and the satisfaction of certain moral constraints on
one’s passional motivations and the content of one’s faith-commitment,
on the other—it is morally permissible to make a “doxastic
faith-venture”—that is, to take belief in God to be true
in one’s practical reasoning, while recognizing that it is not
certified by one’s total available evidence (147). The brand of
fideism for which Bishop argues is thus ‘supra-evidential’
in the sense that it defends the permissibility of reasoning on the
basis of commitments that outrun what is warranted on purely
evidential grounds. Like Evans, and in keeping with James and Pascal,
however, Bishop is careful to distinguish supra-evidential fideism
from counter-evidential fideism: unlike the latter, the former, he
argues, cannot be shown to violate any epistemic obligations.
Although, unlike some putative fideists, Bishop does not regard
evidentialism as incoherent or epistemically irresponsible, he argues
that fideism of the kind he defends is preferable on broadly moral
grounds, suggesting, for instance, that fideism’s tolerance for
passional commitments conduces to a more balanced acceptance of human
nature as more than purely rational (216–220).

One difference between these two contemporary versions of fideism is
that Evans focuses primarily on what is permissible in an epistemic
sense, whereas Bishop begins with the ethics of fideistic
belief, by considering the justifiability in moral terms of taking
religious beliefs to be true in one’s practical reasoning. Unlike
holding beliefs to be true, taking them to be true
in practical reasoning, Bishop argues, is subject to direct voluntary
control and an appropriate subject for moral evaluation. Yet, insofar
as such faith-ventures are not counter-evidential, he argues, they
carry epistemic entitlement too.

Another difference is that Evans regards faith as justifiable in light
of inherent limits to human rationality as such, whereas on Bishop’s
account, evidential ambiguity is a feature of the world viewed
relative to what he calls “our rational empiricist evidential
practice.” The latter qualification seems to leave room for
other practices to which ambiguity about God’s existence might be
foreign. Bishop raises this possibility in a discussion of
“isolationist” epistemologies (such as Wittgensteinian
Fideism, if such a thing exists), which attempt to segregate questions
of evidential support for religious claims from the standards of a
“wider, generally prevailing, evidential practice” (79).
From within what the isolationist regards as the appropriate practice,
the “evidence” may seem to point incontrovertibly toward,
e.g., theistic conclusions (or certain propositions about God may
count as basic). However, Bishop contends that insofar as questions
may still arise for the reflective believer about the justifiability
of commitment to the framework principles of the theistic
doxastic practice, isolationism cannot avoid the need for doxastic
ventures that outrun the available evidence. Some version of fideism
thus seems unavoidable for the reflective believer. But granting, for
the sake of the argument, that Bishop is right about the options
available to the contemporary reflective believer, it might
nevertheless be argued that a very different situation obtained prior
to the development of rational empiricist evidential practice (and
perhaps continues to obtain where that practice has not taken root).
Arguably for premodern thinkers there was no question of
“isolating” belief in God from any “wider, generally
prevailing, evidential practice,” and thus no existential
“choice” to be made about which standards to employ. If
this is right, it provides additional support for the claim that it is
anachronistic to describe someone like Tertullian as a fideist. Put
differently, starting from the thesis of evidential ambiguity allows
for the historicizing of fideism, in a way that encourages us to view
the possibility to which the descriptive use of the term refers as
contingent on particular historical developments, rather than as
perennially available—i.e., as a distinctively modern response
to a distinctively modern problem.

Where Bishop and Evans agree is that some version of fideism
is justifiable—on moral and/or rational grounds—even if
what is believed by faith itself requires no external
evidential support. Their quarrel is thus not with reason tout
court, but with certain philosophical assumptions about belief
entitlement.

As we saw above, Evans and Bishop seek to rehabilitate fideism by
identifying spaces inaccessible to (some form of) reason: faith is
warrantable where reason reaches its limit. But suppose there is no
such limit. This is the counter-fideistic suggestion made by the
contemporary French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux, who seeks to
undercut religious theism by denying it a conceptual sphere of its
own. If there is no distinction to be made between faith and reason
that would constitute a limit to the latter, then philosophy need not
yield to religious claims to extra-rational revelation.

According to Meillassoux, the attractions of fideism can be traced to
what he takes to be a basic dogma of philosophical thought since Kant,
which he calls correlationism. According to correlationism,
thinking and being go hand in hand, such that there can be no
conception of the world independent of human experience: things in
themselves are thus unknowable (and on a strong reading unthinkable).
Correlationists embrace finitude as part of the human condition; it is
within this finitude that post-metaphysical thought, including
phenomenology and analytic philosophy, operates. So understood,
philosophy seeks to describe what is given in experience, but
it can furnish these facts with no ultimate ground or necessity.
According to post-metaphysical philosophy, the principle of sufficient
reason—whatever its utility in the phenomenal world—is
thus circumscribed within a more fundamental abyss of contingency.

Meillassoux argues that this drawing of a boundary to reason within
post-metaphysical philosophy is what authorizes fideistic
religion:

Accordingly, facticity entails a specific and rather remarkable
consequence: it becomes rationally illegitimate to disqualify
irrational discourses about the absolute on the pretext of their
irrationality. From the perspective of the strong model, in effect,
religious belief has every right to maintain that the world was
created out of nothingness from an act of love, or that God’s
omnipotence allows him to dissolve the apparent contradition between
his complete identity and His difference with his Son. These
discourses continue to be meaningful—in a mythological or
mystical register—even though they are scientifically and
logically meaningless (41).

Far from abolishing the value of the absolute, the process that
continues to be referred to today as “the end of
absolutes” grants the latter an unprecedented
licence—philosophers seem to ask only one thing of these
absolutes: that they be devoid of the slightest pretensions to
rationality. The end of metaphysics, understood as the
“de-absolutization of thought,” is thereby seen to consist
in the rational legitimation of any and every variety of religious (or
“poetico-religious”) belief in the absolute, so long as
the latter invokes no authority beside itself. To put it in other
words: by forbidding reason any claim to the absolute, the end of
metaphysics has taken the form of an exacerbated return of the
religious (45).

Meillassoux concludes that, insofar as it cedes the absolute—the
domain once claimed by metaphysics—to religion, strong
correlationsim is “merely the other name” for
fideism (48).

For his part, Meillassoux advocates not a return to pre-critical
metaphysics, but a critique of Critique, which would re-open
philosophical access to what he calls the “great
outdoors”—i.e., Kant’s “thing in itself” or,
to put it in Meillassoux’s terms, the “thing without me.”
While conceding that sensory concepts imply a human relation to the
world, Meillassoux argues that mathematics offers privileged access to
“primary qualities,” thus breaking philosophy out of
correlationism. Rather than simply describing what is given in
experience, speculative philosophy can venture alongside the physical
sciences into an account of the world before human beings existed,
which Meillassoux calls “ancestrality.”

The ensuing account is one in which Meillassoux rejects any idea of
necessary being, whether religious or metaphysical. Where
correlationism attributes the apparent absence of any sufficient
(metaphysical) reason for the existence of things to an
epistemological limit, Meillassoux argues that it points to something
ontological:

We must convert facticity into the real property whereby everything
and every world is without reason, and is thereby capable
of actually becoming otherwise without reason. We must grasp how
the ultimate absence of reason, which we will refer to as
“unreason,” is an absolute ontological property, and not
the mark of the finitude of our knowledge (53).

The only absolute, on this understanding, is the principle of
unreason – i.e., the necessity of contingency.

Instead of retiring the concept of God, however, Meillassoux wants to
claim it for philosophy: what takes the place of revealed religion, on
this account, is not straightforwardly atheism, but the God of the
philosophers. God’s inexistence belongs, Meillassoux argues, to the
general contingency he takes to be the condition of all being. Put the
other way around, this means that it is necessarily the case that
God’s existence is possible (Watkin, 149). On Christopher Watkin’s
reading, “Meillassoux comes tantalisingly close here to implying
that the only way to be rid of God is rationally to prove his
existence, but we shall have to wait a little while longer for his
conclusion on the existence of God” (137).

Given its contrarian approach to nearly the whole of modern
philosophy, Meillassoux’s thought is at least as controversial as the
“fideism” it challenges, and its plausibility depends on
one’s position on a host of fundamental issues which it is beyond the
scope of this article to discuss. (For useful critical discussions of
Meillassoux’s thought, see Sparrow and Watkin.) In this respect, it
helps to show how the question of fideism, far from being a peripheral
issue in the philosophy of religion, leads directly into the very
deepest questions of modern metaphysics and epistemology.

Phillips, D.Z., 1981. “Belief, Change, and Forms of Life:
The Confusions of Externalism and Internalism,” in Frederick
Crosson (ed.), The Autonomy of Religious Belief, Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press.

–––, 1993. “Religious Beliefs and
Language-Games,” in Wittgenstein and Religion, New
York: St. Martin’s Press.

Plantinga, Alvin, 1983. “Reason and Belief in God,”
in Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (eds.), Faith and
Rationality: Reason and Belief in God, Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press.

Popkin, Richard H., 1964. The History of Scepticism from
Erasmus to Descartes, revised edition, New York: The Humanities
Press.

–––, 1992. “Fideism, Quietism, and
Unbelief: Skepticism For and Against Religion in the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries,” in Marcus Hester (ed.), Faith,
Reason, and Skepticism, Philadelphia: Temple University
Press.